CRADLE OF CHANGE
It is hard to find any “old” photo of Yang Chaowen’s village as people living there were too poor in the past to buy a camera. By old, Yang means the days before 2000.
Yang is from Shibadong, a village in Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Hunan Province, central China, where the residents are mostly from the Miao minority community. Shibadong got its name from 18 natural karst caves, a landmark scenic spot in the village. It took months for the locals to decide on the name after four smaller villages were combined in 2005 to form a bigger one.
But no matter what the village was called, for Yang, it didn’t make any difference at that time. A poor, quiet and empty place as almost all the young people had left to seek their livelihood in the cities, the village’s only asset was its landscape. Located in the highlands in the Wuling.
